UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Netanyahu again commended Trump for standing up for Israel during the U.N. General Assembly meeting last week, when the Trump administration announced it would cut all funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Palestine. The agency helps fund schools and clinics in the West Bank and Gaza – as well as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon – for more than 5 million Palestinian refugees.

Ziad Al Sarafandi, a member of the refugees’ department in the Gaza Strip, told Gulf News that Washington’s efforts to weaken UNRWA by imposing serious cuts to its budget are meant to make a decision on one of the major Palestinian issues — refugees.

“The US administration, the Israeli occupation regime’s biggest ally, falsely claims the international organisation is inflating the numbers of Palestinian refugees by conferring refugee status on descendants of more than 750,000 Palestinians who fled their ancestral villages in 1948 as a result of the genocide perpetrated against them by the Zionists,” he said.

This brief is in part a direct response to an attempt to pinkwash the Muslim Travel Ban. Language included in the Ban says it will protect Americans by barring entry to “those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation” [Human Rights First]. This insinuates that people living in Muslim-majority countries are queerphobic and transphobic, a marketing and political tool most infamously being used by Israel to justify Palestinian genocide.

As a settler-colonialist project, Zionism sought the land but not the people in it. Consequently, the preconceived plan for Palestinians was set in motion before the Zionist movement arrived, with Theodor Herzl himself theorizing the need to “spirit the penniless Arab population” across the borders while making sure to strike an alliance with the property owners. Settler colonialist projects pursue either genocide or the transfer of the local population, so Zionism is not unique, nor is it an exception to the norm.

I am following on from my last column in which I sought to respond to an opinion put out to the public by Mr Grenville Phillips II of Solutions Barbados regarding the United Nations vote on the status of Jerusalem… Mr Phillips’ conclusion is that the United States under Donald Trump is being bullied by the majority of the nations of the world and that the US is right to retaliate as it sees fit. Such a position would be laughable if the situation weren’t so serious for the Palestinian people… Mr Phillips made the assertion that “this type of targeted sanction is normally reserved for nations committing highly offensive actions, like genocide”… what is clear from the evidence is that a case for genocide of the Palestinian people can be easily made against the Israelis.

“America and Israel were both deeply involved in the genocide of the Mayans. While America provided the Guatemalan army with weapons and military hardware, Israel provided training and advice. The deadly military campaign carried out against rural indigenous peasants was devised by Israeli advisors. The Mayans who managed to survive the campaign were relocated to military-controlled villages again under the guidance of the Israelis who had already successfully crammed the displaced indigenous population of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli authorities were fully aware of the intentions of their Guatemalan counterparts… This was nothing new to the Israelis because they had also been involved in a similar campaign in Palestine where the natives of the land were physically displaced and their culture stolen.”

…following President Trump’s announcement the UN’s General Assembly on December 7th passed nine draft resolutions assuring some protection to the lives and rights of Palestinians… These draft resolutions reveal an ongoing genocidal persecution of the Palestinian people, both the fact of their suffering and humanity’s assessment of a terrible wrong.

Meanwhile, traditional chief and MP Mandla Mandela said on Thursday Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is an act of perverse incitement and aggression against the Palestinians and all freedom loving people in the world. “It affirms that, once again, the USA regime is on the wrong side of history. Just as it supported apartheid South Africa’s brutality it now unashamedly supports apartheid Israel and its ongoing genocide in Occupied Palestine,” he said in a statement.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to Israel is the head of an organization that is being sued by Palestinians for its role in the theft of their land for settlements and other Israeli war crimes.

But, objectively, is Trump really any less vulgar politically than Clinton, who once laughingly declared “we came, we saw, he died” to describe the horrific death—sodomized by bayonets—of Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi? Some liberals in their search for reasons to support Clinton over Sanders have pointed to her “extensive” foreign policy experience. Actually, they would be better off not bringing up the topic. Does it matter that this experience includes supporting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq? Does it matter that she supports global assassinations by drone as an instrument of foreign policy? Or that as Secretary of State in 2009 she had her slippery hand involved in the right-wing coup in Honduras? Does it matter she has stood as an unabashed apologist for Israel’s repeated genocidal assaults on Palestinian Gaza?